Human Well-being, Ecosystem Services And Watershed Management In The Credit River Valley: Web-distributed Mechanisms And Indicators For Communication And Awareness

This project is one section of a larger project undertaken between researchers at York University and the Credit Valley Conservation Authority (CVC). The ultimate goal of the project is to identify links between human health and natural ecosystems, and incorporate these connections into a web-based decision making tool that can be used by planners, ecologists and policy makers at CVC. The following paper provides background information about the project as well as the concept of ecosystem approaches to health or ‘ecohealth’. The larger project uses the framework and vocabulary of ecosystem services as defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in order to define and describe the connections that exist between natural ecosystems and human health. This framework is described and critiqued in the paper. Finally, three toolkits are presented that specifically describe the relationship between a proposed intervention upon the landscape and the consequences it would have for human health in the surrounding area. Each toolkit contains a completed matrix based upon the cascade model of ecosystem services that shows the progression from intervention to human health benefit.